“He seems very different,” she ventured.

“Oh, quite,” said Beaton.  “He’s the kind of person that you might suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he’s a cloistered nature—­the nature that atones and suffers for.  But he’s awfully dull company, don’t you think?  I never can get anything out of him.”

“He’s very much in earnest.”

“Remorselessly.  We’ve got a profane and mundane creature there at the office who runs us all, and it’s shocking merely to see the contact of the tyro natures.  When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos—­he likes to put his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political interest for himself on the East Side—­it’s something inexpressible.”

“I should think so,” said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused it.  He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, “Well, the man of one idea is always a little ridiculous.”

“When his idea is right?” she demanded.  “A right idea can’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh, I only said the man that held it was.  He’s flat; he has no relief, no projection.”

She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her to his own, disadvantage.  It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a little too exacting for comfort in her idealism.  He put down the cup of tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato:  “I must go.  Good-bye!” and got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of having suddenly thought of something imperative.

He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment’s hail and farewell, and felt himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation with half a dozen other people.  He fancied that at crises of this strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him, and confidential, of all things, about her niece.  She ended by not having palpably been so.  In fact, the concern in her mind would have been difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments Mrs. Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her.  She had watched with growing anxiety the girl’s tendency to various kinds of self-devotion.  She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire withdrawal from the world in a life of good works.  Before now, girls had entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the young and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament to be influenced by them.  During the past summer she had been unhappy at her separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come.  Margaret had her correspondents